


Dear Hadrian

by sunflowerbright



Series: Hotel California [19]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Schönberg/Boublil, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Depression, M/M, mentions of other pairings, surprise guest this chapter, warning tag for burns, warning tags for the usual things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-26
Updated: 2013-07-26
Packaged: 2017-12-21 10:57:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/899486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunflowerbright/pseuds/sunflowerbright
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>There are many ways to be lost, and one of the most frequent is the path of good intentions. People roam that one like wild animals, herding each other along, wandering alone for the most part, looking at the shiny objects, marvelling at them. Never fixing the textures. They dare not touch. </i>
</p><p> </p><p>  <i>And when they do, something usually breaks.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Dear Hadrian

 

Grantaire is ten years old when he meets Eponine and wonders if he’s ever seen her before. He convinces himself that he hasn’t.

But he still clings to her, like he hasn’t dared cling to much else in his life. It helps that she clings right back – it makes the whole mess a story of mutual dysfunction, instead of something sadder, born of desperation.

_(Grantaire thinks he wants that last bit on his tomb-stone)_

He’s ten when he meets Eponine, and years later she’s still like an anchor in a stormy harbour, sloshing in the water as unsettled as he, but with a core of iron that not even years of scurrying saltwater can wear to rust.

He wonders if he should officially change his last name to Thénardier. He breaks someone’s nose one evening and thinks now should be a good time to do so.

Eponine would hate him for it. A part of him wants to do it just to annoy her.

“Some people do just go by one name,” she says, one starless night. They’re sitting on a roof-top, blowing smoke from bad cigarettes into the air, watching it play in the moonlight. “Like Madonna or Prince,” she continues. “Or you.”

“Or Jesus,” he comments, only half-listening to what she says: he’s watching the smoke. The shapes, the patterns. He’s wondering if anyone else can see them.

She laughs, like clear bells, at that.

People like them don’t, have a laughter like that. They have mocking and annoyed and humourless to add in front of. They don’t get to be see-through and clear, they get mist and smoke and a city shrouded in darkness, because the stars didn’t care to come out when all they had to see were two lost souls.

It’s not that he doesn’t want to laugh, laugh like waves crashing over sand and wind ruffling through leaves _(naturally, laughter that comes easy, without thought or burden)._

It’s just that he can’t.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He’s fourteen when it gets really bad.

It’s hard to see and feel, and have good things when your own family burned it all to the ground before your very eyes (literally), but it doesn’t get really bad before he’s fourteen.

Nothing happens.

Maybe that’s it.

There’s been several milestones, big, huge moments in his life. The death of his parents. Aforementioned incident of pyromantics and lunacy. Finding a little girl crying on the sidewalk, and taking her home to her elder sister.

He wakes up one day when he’s fourteen and he’s lost all his faith in humanity. As if Peter Pan crept into his room in the middle of the night to steal his shadow. It’s not a startling revelation: he would hardly notice his shadow to be gone, he thinks, before the sun fell just right and he happened to look down.

He woke up one other day and his life was gone as well. He thinks Eponine is all sharp, jagged edges, but she’s willing to fight. Grantaire puts on a saccharine smile and doesn’t even bother to pretend.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jehan gives him half of his cigarettes the first time they meet, and Grantaire thinks they’re going to be great friends.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“I don’t know why,” Eponine tells him, because she’s just kissed Combeferre and she’s flushed and almost angry.

“Why the hell are you asking me?” he mutters, because this is confusing. Bahorel is busy making smoke-rings beside him.

Grantaire stays in this moment longer than in the others.

He’s not sure why, and he doesn’t have the mind, or the time, to wonder.

“I don’t know how to handle it. Any of it,” Eponine tells him. “And I don’t think he knows how to handle grief. Maybe that’s why.”

“How sappy,” he tells her.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s easy to tease when you’ve declared yourself the outsider looking in. The observer.

An observer looks on. Grantaire is an observer.

He might comment. But he doesn’t participate, not really. He does not make choices that affect the others to a high degree.

When he does, bad things happen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“I’m too wild for you,” Montparnasse tells him when he’s sixteen and high. He laughs about it for hours. The other man lets himself be pulled into a kiss, confused though he is, because Grantaire is still laughing. He doesn’t understand.

Grantaire doesn’t either.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“I’m going to be a scientist!” he tells his father when he’s five and has just learned the word ‘scientist’. His father nods, with a smile. It’s the first time, and the last time, he remembers the man looking proud of his son.

He’s eight when he sketches Frank Dicksee’s _‘Funeral of a Viking’_ with a worn-out pencil from the school and an A4 stolen from the printer.

His teacher’s eyes are round with wonderment.

“You have an extraordinary talent,” she tells him. Her hair is dark like coals. Her eyes glow like the embers among them. It’s the first time he thanks another person in his life – genuinely thanks them.

He’s eight the first, and only time, someone tells him he’s going to do great things.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When you’re eight and half of you haven’t burned away yet _(more than half),_ you tend to believe what the grown-ups tell you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

*

 

 

 

 

 

“They weren’t supposed to come back,” Ai tells him, voice laden with science and facts. “Montparnasse and Javert. They weren’t supposed to be reincarnated, at all, their souls didn’t have the… the handle for it. It just doesn’t work for some people. But they did come back. And something went wrong. So now they can’t die. At all. I’m sorry, but it… it only works for them. They keep coming back. They’re trapped.”

 _I am too_ , Grantaire thinks

 

 

 

 

 

*

 

 

 

 

“Please come back home,” Eponine says, and because it’s her, he doesn’t ignore her like he did the others before. He can’t afford to ignore Eponine – he loves all of his friends, but he owes her almost everything he’s ever gained.

“No,” he says, and it’s the first time he’s spoken in almost two days, and his voice is rusty and unforgiving. He isn’t sure if it’s just tired, or if it sounds like this because he has been crying. He doesn’t remember crying. Or sleeping. Or being awake – not really.

He’s just been sitting here with his memories. And his decisions.

She sits with him, dear, sweet Eponine _(she will punch him if he says it out loud. Two days ago he would have),_ and stays until Joly comes to get her. They’re not walking around outside alone, at least two and two, always. It’s too dangerous otherwise. Smart.

Grantaire says nothing. He stays where he is.

He’s been in a morgue before. He’s been in one to see his parents – what was left of them after the river had taken its due from their lifeless bodies, of course. He’s been here to pick up Combeferre, once when he was asked to drive him to a rally. They were all morgues in the hospital.

This one isn’t. It’s Mabeuff’s. Because apparently the man has a fucking morgue.

Naveen’s body is here somewhere. Preserved in a cold metal-drawer, until the current crisis was dealt with and they could have his funeral in relative peace.

He wonders if it’s claustrophobic, being in there. He wonders if Ana-Maria has his soul stored likewise, in some small jar or vial. He wonders if she keeps them all right under her skin. If they spring, fully formed, from her thigh or her forehead, like she’s some Machiavellian Zeus.

Well, even more Machiavellian. Zeus always gave him the creeps, to be honest.

“Grantaire,” Jehan says, Feuilly a shadow behind him. More time must have passed. Or maybe they’re all regularly checking up on him. In turns.

“At least try to drink something.”

The tea is tasteless. He might have started crying if it was Jasmine. Feuilly leaves him a blanket, a good precaution when you’re sitting on the floor in a cold, cold morgue. He wonders if he’ll get warm again if he sets something on fire

_(he wonders what it will look like, red fire taking hold of black-as-night-curls, like embers over coal)_

Courfeyrac comes next, and he’s crying. He’s been crying for a long time, Grantaire thinks.

For a moment he also thinks the other man is going to hit him. But Courfeyrac only lets out a shaky breath and sits down next to him, resting against the wall. Their shoulders are touching, and Grantaire realises how cold he’d been. Courfeyrac looks pale as a corpse, but he’s still radiating warmth. Like always.

He wonders how long Courfeyrac has been crying. He wants to form the words to make this better.

And Grantaire does have the words. He’s already assured himself with them. He has the words, and he could tell them to Courfeyrac, but he is not certain how they would be received.

Maybe they’d lock him up, lock him away. Maybe Courfeyrac would agree with him, would nod and say _yes, yes I’ll help._

Grantaire hopes the last one will happen, but he knows it won’t. He can’t say anything to make this better, and he almost wishes that Courfeyrac would just punch him, would yell and curse, that any of them would, one of them or all of them.

He knows he’s separated himself: he knows it’s too early to say that the others are dealing with this, but at least they aren’t hiding it out, aren’t holing themselves up and not even drinking, not sleeping, not living.

Is it really such a surprise that he’s the one taking it like this? Grantaire knows that _he_ isn’t surprised. Not being so pathetic, not at the fact that he waited ten hours to wash the blood off of himself, and then did so mechanically, something inside him snapping. It didn’t hurt, seeing the red disappear, swirling over the white porcelain, didn’t make what had happened seem further away or closer. The blood was just blood: it wasn’t a fucking symbol. It didn’t hold all the answers, or give him some great insight into what was going on, into what had happened. It didn’t hurt.

It didn’t hurt.

“I can’t believe he’s really gone,” Courfeyrac says, and his voice is too loud in the quiet of their own little hadestown, and Grantaire can’t stand it. So he doesn’t answer.

“I can’t…” Courfeyrac stops himself, tongue darting out to lick his lips. Grantaire wonders if Jehan could come with tea for him as well, so he doesn’t dehydrate. So he doesn’t go completely to waste, like the corpses they’re with.

Like Grantaire.

“I don’t know what to do,” Courfeyrac continues, voice softer now, not echoing between the walls like ghosts shrieking at the living.

_(there aren’t any living people in the room except for Courfeyrac. Grantaire doesn’t tell him that)_

Grantaire doesn’t know what Courfeyrac should, could, would do either, so he still says nothing, because he doesn’t have the words to reassure, only the words to destroy, and in this case, the words to worry and dispute, and he’s long lost his voice to a sink filled with clean, cold water, completely clear now that the blood had washed away.  

Courfeyrac gets up slowly and leaves.

The next one to come to down there is Mabeuf, of all people. Maybe it is not so odd, since it is his morgue after all, but Grantaire had not expected him.

“I’m touched,” he says when the elderly man hands him a water-bottle. Mabeuf’s eyes are large and round and sad, and Grantaire thinks they’ve always been like that, though years _(and years and years)_ have added to the sorrows.

Mabeuf never died, not really. It was such a short moment, the few hours fighting on the barricade after the man had gone to salvage the flag, that it hardly counts. It’s not the soul resting for eons upon eons. Grantaire wonders what that’s like. And not just in a high-end _never been to the other side_ , way of things. He’s lived all this time: he’s seen wars, visible and hidden, he’s fought in some of them. He’s met people, he’s connected and he’s lost.

He’d lost everything already before Ana-Maria decided he’d be useful to keep around for the long term. He’d had nothing, not a coin to his name, not a single person to name family.

Grantaire thinks he can look in the mirror and not see anyone half as sad as Mabeuf is.

“Thank-you,” he says when the man pulls up a chair to sit, close to his own spot on the floor, but not too close.

“Sarcasm still does not become you, young man.”

If anyone could call him ‘young man’, it would be Mabeuf. If anyone could call anyone that, it would be Mabeuf.

“I wasn’t being sarcastic,” he says, and means it. “Thank-you. For everything you’ve done for me. I know you did it because you had my best interest in mind.”

There are many ways to be lost, and one of the most frequent is the path of good intentions. People roam that one like wild animals, herding each other along, wandering alone for the most part, looking at the shiny objects, marvelling at them. Never fixing the textures. They dare not touch.

And when they do, something usually breaks.

“It did not end very well,” Mabeuf sounds as old as he is. “It was… nothing has been going according to plan.”

Of course he’d think that, Grantaire thinks. He’s lost almost all of his followers – Ana-Maria’s followers. He’s lost Fantine, one of his most valuable assets. He’s losing the war. Ana-Maria is losing the war.

But most importantly, Mabeuf had seen the people he’d died amongst, in a way, died for, and they’d shunned his ideals, shunned him. Shunned the only thing in his life that had been making sense for literally hundreds of years.

Grantaire wonders if Mabeuf is as tired of it all as they are. It’s on the tip of his tongue to ask for help, to demand it should the request be refused, because Mabeuf held a rightful guilt now, had taken something and he still needed to pay back.

But the white-haired man pulls himself forwards a little, resting his arms on his knees, opening his mouth to speak.

“There is an old story,” he says, and he sounds like a grandfather, old and creaky and full of lands from far away. “About a King, who thought one of his advisors to be too proud, too bold and forward. So he asked him for the impossible: _‘find something’_ , he said, _‘that can make happy men sad, and sad men happy’.”_

Near the old house the Thénardier’s had lived in, there’d been a creek, a muddy monstrosity, filled with discarded soda-cans and plastic-bags, the water murky and brightly coloured in the sunshine, pollution painting beautiful patterns in its hunger to become everything all at once. There’d been an odd smell about the place, human’s discarded things mixing with nature and Grantaire had sat there for hours when he was younger, squinting to see his own reflection in the water.

The image had come out in blacks and purples, greens and blues, ripples to distort it until he looked like a monster from myths and legends, like one of the gargoyles atop the churches, stones wresting loose, tails uncurling, until it stood tall and horrible and alive.

He wonders if there’s something proud in even the vilest of monsters, if Mabeuf had revelled in the power he wielded, had thought himself important. He wonders if the story is about the man himself, or if he’s thought about it, in the long hours of the night when sleep wouldn’t come. He wonders if sleep ever comes for someone who can’t die.

“So the man went looking,” Mabeuf continues his story. “He searched the whole of the kingdom, for days on end, desperate to find the meaning behind his king’s request. He knew he would lose his job, his title, maybe even his life, if he let the king down.”

“He sounds so nice, the king,” Grantaire mumbles, and thinks _Solomon. It was Solomon._

He’s heard the story before, whispered in the safety and comfort of a bed, golden curls brushing his arm, warmth burrowing closer until it felt like they couldn’t let go of each other even if they tried.

His head hurts. It’s a low banging, starting at his temples and behind his eyelids, pressing until its stark white pain. He forces himself to focus on Mabeuf’s words. To let them tether him to the morgue. He’s supposed to stay here.

“Eventually,” Grantaire’s words are ignored, as Mabeuf continues. “The man came across a smith, forging rings in the midday sun. One of them was large, a silver ring, words engraved along the side of it. They read, simply, _this too shall pass._ ”

_“Being dead is not bad, Grantaire,” Enjolras sounds steadfast, sure. “It’s not bad. It’ll pass.”_

It’ll pass.

“Help me,” he asks, and Mabeuf has tears in his eyes now.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “With this I can’t. With this I won’t.”

“Coward,” Grantaire mocks, and it feels odd, to turn that word outward, to use it for someone else, not to hurt, but to state a fact, to taunt in anger because _this too shall pass,_ but people couldn’t change, he’d always said so, and Mabeuf would always offer you a hand with a smile and then take everything else instead. It’s what Ana-Maria had taught him, after all.

The man gets up to leave, the chair scraping across the floor as he pulls it back again. Grantaire’s mouth is dry, his throat, his eyes.

“It was gold,” he says, and his voice is dust. “The ring was gold.”

Mabeuf won’t know what it means. It doesn’t matter.

 

 

 

 

*

 

 

 

 

Grantaire is ten when his father first hits him.

“You are useless,” the man sneers, and Grantaire believes him.

He’s dead the next year, and Grantaire is handed from family-member to family-member, until his head is spinning and he has to say stop, wants to say stop.

His aunts are all too young to take care of him, his uncles too busy. One has to leave the country, chased out because of his political position. He has a friend that lives with him, a tall, slender man with dark hair in a pony-tail. He teaches Grantaire how to juggle, and jokes that the boy can run away with a circus once they’re gone.

He never gets the chance to.

He paints instead, paints while the rest of the world yells and kills and dies. Painting is simple. Painting he can do. Painting is observing, is seeing, and putting what he sees down so that others can see it as well, be it a perfect scene or an emotion or a thought. Painting is memories, and Grantaire clings to his memories like he clings to his addictions, hating and loving the things that tear him down with equal passion.

A master of the arts tells him he uses too much gold, and he follows the man down the hallways before he can stop himself, insisting to be heard for perhaps the first time in his life.

Gros doesn’t want an apprentice, doesn’t want him for an apprentice. But he doesn’t know how to say no to the colourless boy who uses too much gold.

_(he doesn’t stop using ‘too much gold’, he never stops. He thinks Gros hates him for that. He thinks the man is grateful. He thinks, maybe, they are too much alike)_

Grantaire is not ten when he meets Eponine, because he doesn’t meet Eponine, at all. He sees her, broken and bloody. But seeing is not knowing. This much he knows, at least.

“I am afraid I am awfully useless,” he tells a young boy made almost entirely of gold, when he is asked for help. He smiles, and it is saccharine, and it hurts to smile. He looks at the boy and thinks he’ll need more gold, when he comes back to the studio. He needs much more.

The boy is golden and it’s too golden to be human, but there’s red there too, the colour of freedom, apparently _(what a noble concept)_ , and it bleeds through until there’s nothing left, until the golden colour fades.

_(freedom means painting with as much gold as he wants to. It means meaning to smear only a little red, because there is red there, and getting too much, soaking the painting until there is nothing but red, deep red._

_That’s what freedom means_

_Freedom is all red)_

It’s like coals burning to ashes. Even the red fades, slowly after the last bit of gold is gone.

 

 

 

 

‘

*

 

 

 

 

 

 

He tells them he’s not in shock, and they don’t believe him. Why should they? They have no reason to, he thinks.

But he’s not in shock. Cosette is the only one he convinces of this, in the end.

“Cosette,” he says, when she comes down to him, in his little corner of the underworld; does that make Mabeuf the ferryman? Was it blood or silver he demanded?

Grantaire knows what was demanded of him.

“Cosette,” he repeats her name, and it’s a rope he grasps at to pull him out of the water he fell into after burning to ashes. “You know how to find Ana-Maria, don’t you?”

She hesitates, like she should. She hasn’t even heard his request yet, but she knows she isn’t going to like it.

“Or would you rather I go to someone else for help?” he challenges.

‘Someone else’ is Javert or Montparnasse or Michael, even. Cosette knows he won’t stop. And he, thinks, but doesn’t say, _you owe me._

“Marius and I were happy,” she says then, and means _Marius and I were happy back then._ “But we’d lost so much… and now there’s so much potential and I don’t know if we know how to be happy like this together.”

“You love each other,” he comments, and thinks _why does everyone want me to fix their love-life for them._

Maybe they don’t. Maybe he’s just an excellent sounding-board.

“Just because you love someone doesn’t mean you’re supposed to be together.”

He almost wants to laugh, because that only makes him even more determined.

“Ana-Maria,” he says again. Pleads.

Cosette tells him.

 

 

 

 

 

He thinks that maybe Enjolras wanted to understand him. No, scratch that, he _knew_ Enjolras wanted to understand him, because he’d said so himself, had mused at it.

But maybe that’s how it started. Fascination. Because he was not something the other one could just understand like that.

Maybe that was what this was all about. There’s curiosity burning behind frustration, and sometimes it needs an outlet too.

Grantaire should have told him (warned him) that there wasn’t that much to understand. His nature is not complicated – there is no labyrinth of differencing paths and ways behind it. He likes to imagine that there is, because it explains and excuses so much, but there isn’t. And if there ever was, it has crumbled now, gone to rot and ruin. Theseus could walk unhindered and unafraid without his red string, fearing no monster hidden in there. Not now.

It is fortunate, because there is no-one left to guide him with it, anyway.

There isn’t something as transparent as a piece of bright string leading him to Ana-Maria, but there is Cosette’s steady hand in his. He silently vows not to abandon her, like Ariadne was abandoned in the legend of the labyrinth. Cosette will get back home. He’s the one counting on a god’s mercy. It’s the same plan, after all, the same one he had last time, and maybe they’ve just balanced the scales now – a life for a life.

It only seems fair.

Grantaire has long since lost sense of where they’re going, but Cosette seems to know the way – this is what she had been doing those long days where she’d been gone. Walking the terrain. Finding her ground. Maybe she’d had it all explained by Ana-Maria herself, maybe she knew everything that was waiting ahead.

 _Please don’t tell me_ , he thinks, his grip on her hand tightening. He doesn’t want to know.

Even if, maybe he should have asked her to warn him.

Ana-Maria sits in a garden, or maybe it’s a beach: he has sand under his feet, and he can hear the crash of waves, but not see the ocean – there’s peonies, overflowing in the bushes around them. A garden on the beach, he figures – it’s dramatic and secluded, just like he’d imagined her to be.

Or maybe she just likes to look at the flowers. He walks past a set of orchids, wonders how she keeps them in this climate. It feels changing, somehow. He’s not too hot, nor too cold, but then again, he hardly notices these things anymore.

“Hello,” he says, stopping: the bushes form a circle here, giving way to a clearing. Cobblestone has been laid out so that a table and two chairs can stand without sinking into the sand. Ana-Maria sits with the table between them, wearing a simple white t-shirt and dark pants. Her hair is black as night, streaming down her back in long curls, and her eyes are brown and soulless.

“Hello. Please sit,” she says, and she sounds too normal to be real.

Grantaire has seen her before, in a café, trying to drink himself as dead as a young boy in a coffin. _Etienne_. That had been the boy’s name. Ana-Maria had known him, or claimed to know him. He wonders if she thinks, just because she toys around with their souls, that she knows them. If she has a haughty view of them all, if she’s like a mother sighing at her erratic children, wondering what she did wrong when she brought them up, wondering why they can’t just behave.

The thought that what happened, happened because Ana-Maria wanted it to happen, because Enjolras was _in the way_ , sends a surge of panic sweeping through Grantaire, from his chest to his stomach, flowing until it settles in his throat: he almost stumbles, but manages to sit down instead, hiding the clumsy act behind other intent. If she’s seen it, she gives no notice: she just stares at him.

 _Did you get rid of him_ , he thinks, all of his other questions and demands swept away, and tears suddenly prickle the back of his eyes. _Did you do this on purpose._

If Ana-Maria was so intent on getting Enjolras out of the way, then this was going to be that much harder. If it was her fucking plan, it was going to be near impossible, to ask her to bring him back – why should she bother? Why?

 _Because_ , he thinks. _Because you have to._

“Do you want some tea?” she offers, and he realises that she has been talking, without knowing what’s going on in his head, or without letting him know that she knows. It’s probably the latter – she can string their fates like worn and thin thread, and he bets she can poke open his skull and have a look inside as well.

“No, thank-you,” he mumbles. He wants to snarl and yell at her, but she has a presence that means he simply cannot: he has to be polite.

She pours some for herself, and her hands are larger than he expected them to be – the fingers are long and slender, but with callouses, her palms broad like shovels. There are burn-marks, he realises, watching how the pale porcelain contrasts with her dark skin – they’re on the back of her hands, some snaking their way up her arms, disappearing under white sleeves, some folding into the palm, maps and patterns that he suddenly wants to know the story behind.

“You were expecting me,” he says, suddenly, because she was sitting in her little garden in the middle of the day, with tea and room for two, eyes locked on the path he came from.

“Yes,” she pours too much sugar in her tea: Grantaire wants to grimace just looking at it.

He fidgets in his seat, suddenly nervous. “Do you know why I am here?” the words catch in his throat. He hopes she knows. He’d rather not say it.

“You want me to bring your lover back.”

He is grateful, too grateful, that she doesn’t say a name: he’s not sure if he could bear to hear it from her lips right now.

“Can you?” he whispers, words escaping before he can hold them back.

“That’s not the question,” Ana-Maria’s voice has a sharp edge now. Her spoon clings against the sides of her cup as she stirs the tea. “The question is _‘will I?’”_

“Will you?” Grantaire pleads, and he thinks he should be falling down to his knees right about now, should be folding his hand and begging for just an ounce of attention, and he’d do it, he would, if that’s what it took.

He’d do anything.

Ana-Maria looks at him, a frown marring her face, an almost disappointed drag around her mouth: her eyes still convey nothing. They are empty pits. Grantaire can’t look at them for long – it’s what he sometimes sees when he looks in the mirror. Hers are darker than his, but it is the same. For him, at least.

“Really?” she asks. “You have me here, my undivided attention. And you are not going to ask me anything?”

“Ask you?” he’s confused now.

“Ask me,” she repeats, biting out the words. “I will answer your questions, Raphael. Truthfully. If you ask me something I do not wish to answer, I will tell you to ask a new question. But I am letting you in here, letting you have my time, time which is precious, I might add, because you demanded it. Because I know I could not stop you: because you have, from the start, surprised me with your intentions and your amazing will to go through with them. You have my _attention_ , Raphael, and not a lot of people get that. I propose you make use of it.”

He stares at her, in complete shock. Is that what this is? She let him come here, because she wants to share her glories, wants a chance to… explain herself? Wants to apologise, in her own way? Because she cannot say _I am sorry I screwed you over so much_ , she cannot, because she does not believe that, and even if she did, she cannot afford to lose face like that. She’s already losing him: she’s already lost him.

He holds back the startled, shocked, disbelieving laugh: she wouldn’t want to feel mocked. And he still needs her at least somewhat inclined to listen to him as well.

“I don’t care,” he whispers. “I don’t care why you brought me back. I don’t care why I’m so special. I don’t care about your war, about the why or the how, I don’t care about the end results. I care about you taking someone I love, someone who is good and should have a proper chance in this world, because he is going to change it for the better, and I want you to give him back to that world. It needs him.”

_I need him._

He thinks, for just a moment, there is a flicker in her dark eyes: it’s golden, like rays of sun catching on the crashing waves or the wings of a bird flying by. It’s gone almost immediately, and he thinks he probably dreamed it up.

Ana-Maria stares at him, for a very long time. Then she speaks.

“You should be grateful,” she finally says, voice neutral. A light breeze rustles her hair, a lock falling over her shoulder. She is very beautiful, the way an old statue is beautiful. Jehan would call it _tragically mesmerising_. Grantaire would have laughed.

“I am not simply bringing you back like pigs for slaughter. I gave you a better life. Did I not? I made sure Fantine was safe and whole. I made sure Cosette never had to go through the abuse of her former foster-parents. What were you, before I came, street-rats and orphans and outcasts, believers and haters of your own background, your precious _sister_ , that you call her, is getting an education, she is free of her parents, _you_ are free of your parents, do you think that was simply pure luck, Raphael?” she puts her tea down on the table, untouched. “I am not as cruel as you think. The things I do, I do out of necessity. The things I do for you, the benefits, the loved ones I make you find again, I do those because I think you deserve them. Because I know I take a lot, but I can also offer something in return.  A soul, any soul, is worn and marked by its previous lives. It takes an expert to blow not only new life and purpose into that, but also safety and assurance. And I do that: I do not have to do it, Raphael. I would be truly cruel if I did not.”

“That is such bullshit,” he whispers, half-hoping she will not hear: he cannot scream and yell at her, he cannot, no matter how much he means to, means to cut her open like she cut open him and took what she thought was her due.

He’s offering it to her on a silver-platter now: anything, anything she might have need of. Anything she wants.

She doesn’t get angry: she just chuckles lightly.

“If I was not here, your precious world would go to waste,” she tells him. “It would be like throwing meat to a pack of wolves. The wolves, in this case, being Michael.”

“So we’ll get rid of you both,” his voice is cold and unforgiving, and this is what Enjolras would have said, what Enjolras would have promised, and he cannot keep the words back even should he wish.

Enjolras is not here to say them, so he damn well will.

“I still don’t understand why you of all people hate me this much,” Ana-Maria says, and another person would sound sad or angry. She doesn’t sound like either. She sounds like nothing. She is nothing.

“I gave you your life back. I gave you an opportunity at the love you had always wanted. Mabeuf took your memories without me telling him to, that was no fault of mine.”

“All of this is your fault,” Grantaire says, voice cold. “I am going to hold you accountable, of course I am, of course we all are, a thousand years among us and you know nothing about humans? You come in here, and you meddle with our lives, and you think giving us shiny objects makes up for the fact that you’re taking our future, our memories, our lives away, but it doesn’t!”

“I _gave_ you your lives!” she hisses, and he expects her to look ugly when she does, to reveal a true nature of shadow and death, but she sounds angry and that’s it. She sounds human.

“Not originally,” he says. “Because you can’t do that, can you? You can give us back our lives, our first lives. You can make hazy copies and shades, you can bring back traits and family, but you cannot reshape the future exactly as you want it. You’re not omnipotent, no matter what you might like us to think. So you cheat and lie and manipulate us, until we think that we need you, that we fucking owe you for the little clutch of happiness you grant us, and now you get insulted when I come to your face and call you out, because I can fucking see you, do you realise that? I can see exactly what you are, and what you’re doing. You can put on a mask and pretend to be a loving human all you like, but you never have been, have you? You don’t understand this either. You don’t understand what’s going on, you don’t understand why you’re fighting. You’re not getting your orders from anywhere, all you got was a life and some shitty powers and you took it and shaped it, and let your hatred for the only other one just like you fucking consume you. I know about hate. So I know you.”

He’s guessing. A lot of it is guessing. And the rest is a haze, like a thin line of film lying over memories returned: memories that she had used, for whatever the hell she’d used them for. Things leave an imprint.

That’s when he realises that she is scared of him: and that’s why she’s letting him talk now.

“I shouldn’t have to tell people what to do,” she says then, voice quiet. “You accuse me both of not guiding you, of lying and manipulation, but I should not have to tell people to be decent. I should not have to tell you to do the right thing. That should be all you. Don’t you think?”

 _Humans don’t work like that_ , Grantaire thinks, and it is not an excuse for the collected community of mankind, it is a fact that has kept him up at night until he accepted it with a quiet sigh and woke up with another piece of his soul chipped away.

_(he wonders if that fell into her hands as well)_

“Why me then?” he asks, because if that is what she wants, if she’s looking for the good and kind and just, she should be looking at the person he came here for, she should be looking at the people he has left behind.

“You,” she laughs now, a surprisingly deep sound. Like a bell at the bottom of the sea. When she stops there are tears in her eyes.

“You are perhaps the kindest and bravest human soul I have ever met.”

He wants to wave what she’s saying away, wants to laugh at her, wants to leave in disbelief and anger.

He wants to tell her all the ways he’s wrong, because he has lists, long like the Seine and in both alphabetical and chronological order, all proof of how wrong she is, but he doesn’t _care_. He doesn’t care what she thinks of him, doesn’t care if he’s supposed to save her or she’s supposed to save him, doesn’t care that she’s become deluded and mad through the years.

He only cares about the opportunity, the last chance that she can possibly give.

“You are wrong in that I do not know what I am fighting for,” Ana-Maria continues then, voice soft. The tears have disappeared: he thinks her eyes a little less like deep, dark pits now, but perhaps that is just because he has gotten used to them. There is a flicker of blue in them now, dark like the skies in a storm.

“I know what my purpose is, and I know that my purpose is a just and good one. You might not like my methods, but I am fighting the good fight. Michael decidedly, is not. I have dedicated my life to kill him: when he dies, so will I. Can you not agree that that is a very selfless thing?”

“I don’t care,” he tells her. “I really don’t care, about your war, about your excuses, I care about none of it. Do you understand?”

She shakes her head at him. “Then why did you come here?”

“I came here for Enjolras,” Grantaire says, and the name is a liberating and heavy thing to say: he thinks there is sunlight beating down on them, but he still does not feel its warmth. It wraps around his skin like veins and fingers, prodding at him to wake up. But he doesn’t.

“I’ll give you anything,” he says, and his tongue ties itself in knots, but he gets the words out anyway. “My life, the one you apparently care about so much, the one you need because I’m some kind of disturbingly good energy that helps fuels your cannons for war, or whatever the hell it is. My memories, all of them. My hair, my teeth, my fingernails. I’ll paint for you until my hands bleed, I’ll sing you a soft song to put you to sleep. I’ll whisper the only secrets about me you don’t know in your ear, if only you’ll bring him back.”

She looks at him, and relief wells up, because she is considering.

“Is that all you have to offer?” she asks then, and there is a sickly sweet smell of roses hanging in the air. The relief disappears.

“Please,” he whispers. Her eyes are soft: deep and dark and unyielding, but somehow still soft.

“Do you even know what he did for you?” she asks. “What _he_ was willing to do to get you back? He nearly died. And he didn’t care, just like you’re sitting here, not caring either. So if I do take your life, or your sweet songs or your hair or your talent, who says he will not just come for you like you have come for him?”

“He’ll have more important things to do,” Grantaire says, has convinced himself already. _He’ll have you and Michael to bring down._

She must be thinking the same.

“I won’t have forced loyalty,” she says then. “No matter what you may think of me, I do not want that. So you are free. You do not have to slave for me, Raphael: none of you are slaves. And I have no interest in your memories – they break you, you think, but the truth is you are not whole without all parts of you present. And memories are something to cling to, in the dark of night. I will leave you with those as well.”

“Then what do you want?” he grits out, because she has not rebutted his offer completely, has not said she will not do it.

“I can’t bring him back,” she says then, and the world tilts and threatens to swallow Grantaire whole. “It has to be you that does it.”

“What?”

“Are you willing?” her tone is sharp, threatening, questioning. He has no idea what he’s getting himself into, no idea what she might ask him to face.

“Yes,” he doesn’t even hesitate.

“Good,” she says, and tells him her terms.

 

 

 

 

*

 

 

 

 

Grantaire finds out how she got those marks on her hands.

It sears and tears, blood welling up as skin bursts, and Grantaire think he’s going to die from the pain, thinks any minute now the non-existent flames will reach up and lick at the rest of his skin until they find bone and turn it charred and broken, until there is nothing left.

He thinks it can try: there hasn’t been anything left of him since Enjolras died.

It’s like this for her every time, reaching in and pulling out a soul. Not neat little vials, like he’d thought. Not like a butcher opening an animal and pulling out what’s needed, rearranging and adjusting. Frankenstein’s little project.

It’s not the freezing pits of hell: it’s not the soaring flames of it either. It’s not the River Styx, cooling his skin as it pulls away the last bits of him – it’s not a cold and dark and terrifying underworld. It’s just Grantaire, with his hand in a nest of flames, his feet near the water’s edge, water coming in waves to tickle at his heels. He doesn’t even notice the tide coming in, doesn’t see the water reaching for his waist. Somehow the flames stay clear of it.

They are not even real flames: they are memories of souls, they’re pure lives, energy and life-forces and they burn hot and wild and too short, the next ones coming out immediately to play with his hands. They’re people that he knew and people he has never known, and they’re all pulling him in and tearing off pieces and parts of him, because that’s what people do, they come through your life like a desert-fire and leave you stripped to the bone and scarred forever.

He doesn’t even know what he’s doing: he’s only reaching.

And then he feels a hand slipping into his, the grip tight: that should be painful. There is absolutely no skin left on his hand, there is nothing but blood and fire, but the tears streaming down his face are tears of relief.

“Enough,” Ana-Maria tells him, and pulls him away and into the water. “It’s done.”

His tears mix with the salt of the ocean, and he lets the flames die out.

 

 

 

 

 

*

 

 

 

 

 

“Go down and check on your friend,” Mabeuf tells Jehan when he steps in to hang back the book he had borrowed – an old journal by someone like them. Someone like him.

Jehan frowns and opens his mouth to tell Mabeuf that Grantaire had gone, had suddenly disappeared yesterday, but then there is a sound like an earthquake and he falls to the floor, and everything inside of him screams and resists, _he_ wants to scream, but nothing comes out.

And then the world returns to normal and he _knows_.

He’s running downstairs to the morgue, and wonders how Mabeuf knew, and he almost crashes into Combeferre, on his way up: maybe he explains or says something, anything. Maybe he just pulls his friend along with him, back down in the morgue.

They get there seconds after Enjolras has opened his eyes.

 

 

 

 

 

*

 

 

 

 

 

Eponine is standing on a street-corner and smoking, when Montparnasse finds her.

Or rather, stumbles upon her: he wasn’t really looking for her. He tells himself.

“Everything alright?” he asks, reaching for her cigarette, which is promptly holds out of his reach. She gets the packet out of the pocket in her jacket and opens it for him instead. He grins: this is why he liked her. Willing to share if she knew you’d share back.

“Yep,” she blows out smoke through her nose. “We got Enjy back. He just woke up last night.”

“ _Enjy_.”

She smiles a bit too widely. “It’s my new nickname for him. He hates it so much. It’s fun.”

 _“Enjy!_ Seriously? _”_

She shrugs, taking another drag. He lights the one he took, almost dropping his lighter: Eponine catches it for him, quick like a cat.

“Hey, I like this one,” she says, turning it around to look at it. It’s plain silver, a dark rose on one side, an engraved R on the other. Montparnasse stares at her.

“Yeah, well, you’re the one that got it for him, y’know,” he says, plucking it out of her hand again. “I promise I’ll return it, I just need to actually find the bastard.”

Her cigarette hangs loose from her fingers as she stares at him. “I gave who what?”

“The lighter,” he holds it up for her to see again. “It’s the one you gave Grantaire. Are you smoking something you shouldn’t be smoking on an open street, ‘Ponine? His eighteenth birthday. You had it specially made.”

She’s still looking at him like she expects him to make some kind of joke: he only stares back, until she opens her mouth to speak again.

“Who the hell is Grantaire?”

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> \- As always, dedicated to Jess, Martina and Hath
> 
> \- My facecast for Ana-Maria is Gina Torress
> 
> \- The legend of Theseus: he was the hero who went into the labyrinth to slay the Minotaur. He was helped by the king’s daughter, Ariadne, who gave him a piece of red string to lead his way. He later ended up abandoning her on a rock in the ocean, on his way home – she was rescued by the god, Dionysus, who had fallen in love with her. He made her his immortal wife. A lot of other shit happened as well, and douchecanoe Theseus fortunately did not get a happy ending either, but its a pretty fun myth all around (if you like that sort of thing). 
> 
> \- Only one more part to go, and then Hotel California is finished, oh my


End file.
